There is power in story. Both in the telling and the hearing.
History has shown that story has helped shape the human experience. Before there was formal written communication, there were stories.
March is Women’s History Month. Celebrated each year, the 2023 theme is “Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories”. Not a bad theme. But it is both the women who passed the stories down the generations, as well as the characters in the stories, who helped shaped my life.
From the earliest storytellers, our experiences have been captured by a wide variety of storytellers. These include authors, songwriters, scholars, playwrights, performers, and aunts, mothers, and grandmothers throughout time. Women have long been instrumental in passing on our heritage in word, song, the arts and in print to communicate the lessons of those who came before us.
Women’s stories, and the larger human story, expand our understanding and strengthen our connections with each other.
At my grandmothers’ kitchen tables and working alongside them in their gardens, story shaped my values. Hearing about the women in my family who immigrated to north central Indiana, put down roots, and raised families with creativity, faith, and tenacity through the Spanish Flu pandemic, the great depression, World War II, and other triumphs and tragedies, inspired in me a can-do spirit, a deep abiding faith, and an appreciation for the sacrifices made by those who came before me.
Stories of compassion. Stories of my great-grandmother caring for the many sick in her community during the Spanish Flu pandemic. She went into homes for months on end to provide hands-on and comfort care to the sick and dying despite the significant risk to her own health. She also passed down her secret homeopathic remedy to ward off the Spanish flu, but I will not share it here. Who knows if it actually works! (She never did get the Spanish Flu, so maybe…)
Stories of generosity. During the depression, when food was scarce, no one who came knocking at my grandma’s back door ever went away hungry. Noting the number of people asking for food aligned with the schedule of the trains coming into town, a friend pointed out that markings on telephone poles led from the train station to Grandma’s home. The marks, made by drifters headed west on the rails, led hungry travelers to homes where it was known you could get a meal. Upon learning this, Grandma didn’t remove the marks, she just kept serving and sharing out of the little she had.
A strong thread of humor ran deep in their stories. Stories such as my grandfather traveling to town by horse and buggy to court my grandmother. Heading home late, my grandfather would say to his horse “giddy-up home,” then he would sit back and fall asleep with confidence that the horse knew the way home. Grandpa would sleep soundly only waking up when the horse stopped at the barn door and whinnied to be let in. Smart horse. Autonomous driving cars have nothing on her!
They also told stories of servant leadership. As a young father, my dad pastored a country church. While driving home one day, Dad passed by a farmer working in his field. Knowing the farmer was experiencing a life challenge, dad stopped to offer his condolences and asked if there was anything he could do for him in his time of trouble. Taking a look up and down the long fence row overgrown with trees, the man replied “well, I guess you could clear this fence row for me.” The farmer handed Dad his hand saw and walked away. Dad cleared a hundred yards of fence row by hand over the next several months. That farmer never heard Dad preach a sermon in church, but he watched him live one at the edge of that field.
Stories like these and hundreds of others, helped to shape who I am.
What stories will your children and grandchildren not know unless you pass them down? What values would you have them glean and what lessons would you have them take from those who came before? Do they know their history? If you don’t tell them, who will?
Daily life can get in the way of storytelling and passing down oral history. Storytelling and ancestry may hold clues to some of our behaviors, tenacity, strength, talents and interests if only we knew who may have first planted those seeds. Do you know your history? If you have older people around you, ask them questions about their life. If you have young people around you, tell them about your life. Pass stories along, so every generation knows how far we’ve come and how much further we have to go.